Transcript
Antoinetta Carboni:
Hello everyone. Thank you for joining our webinar, how to Eliminate Facts, frustrations, and Reduce Cost with ETHERFAX. I’d like to introduce myself, Antoinette Carboni, National Account Manager here at ETHERFAX. Matt Gary, director of Information Technology at Bio Dorm, and Elizabeth Halkos, Chief Operating Officer at Vivlio Health, who will be our moderator today. Hi Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Halkos:
Hey Antoinetta. Thank you so much for having me and ETHERFAX is a very important to Vivlio Health, so I’m delighted to be hosting this webinar. Before I start, I wanted to reiterate what Antoinette had shared, -which is if you do have questions during the webinar, you can ask them and then we will time permitting go through them at the end of our discussion. So first and foremost, I wanted to give a quick background on our companies and attendees. So first on ETHERFAX. ETHERFAX was founded in 2009. They have a global footprint or are based in New Jersey. They’re a trusted partner in secure document delivery and they offer a suite of applications to digitize workflows and optimize business processes for healthcare organizations. They enable transmitting protected health information and high resolution color documents directly to applications and devices with end-to-end encryption. Their security protocols are top-notch, including HIPAA and SOC two compliance and on Bio Derm. Bio Derm, as you know, is a healthcare portfolio company. They specialize in infection prevention by designing manufacturing and distributing industry leading medical devices to acute care facilities and patient homes. And most recently they were acquired by wound care resources in 2019 and merged this year with Argenta Medical, which has really extended the business into the armed forces and into the international arena.
And then on Matt, Matt is an accomplished executive leader in information technology and information security in the healthcare space at BioDerm specifically, he has built and is responsible for the entire IT OT IS and compliance infrastructure, including designing and implementing first class software development, which has helped to lead to multi-million dollar revenue impact for the sales and account management teams. Under his leadership, the company has remained resilient growing over 650% during his tenure. He currently serves on the board of the Tampa Bay Charter of the Information System Security Association and was previously a board member on USF Cybersecurity Advisory Committee outside of the office. Matt, thank you so much for joining us.
Matt Geary:
Thanks for the introduction. That was excellent.
Elizabeth Halkos:
Of course. And so Matt, I wanted to start off with just a real quick introduction of yourself, your organization and then how you think about it, security, especially when it comes to just the clinical experience and its impact on the clinical experience.
Matt Geary:
Absolutely. So hi everybody. My name is Matthew Geary. I’ve been with BioDerm for eight years. I’m the Director of IT over here. And BioDerm, we’re an innovator of medical devices, so pre-patented RD designs or a moat for medical devices that are creating marketplace solutions. So protecting that moat is very important. We also manufacture our medical devices that we innovate. So we have a clean room here, everything’s made in America, and then we are our own durable medical equipment distributor. So IT security runs deep in our infrastructure. Even our formulation for hydrocolloids is a trade secret. So I don’t want to give away the farm as a security professional with all of our risks, but they’re plenty. So with that and the clinical experience, IT security, we’re dealing with men’s anatomy and our flagship product, and so we have to be sensitive with our patient’s data.
We’re also what’s called a covered entity. So we’re actually, basically we’re the ones that are responsible for our patient’s data both upstream and downstream. There’s significant risk there. And if you think about it, there’s not many other documents out there on all of us that has as much data as a medical record. Your name, your social security number can be on there, your emergency contacts, psychological notes that may be sensitive to you, personal events, things along those lines. So when you’re faxing medical records back and forth, sometimes insurance companies and just continuity of care demands the entire record or the entire patient note. So you can’t really say, give me the minimums there. You don’t have that privilege. So faxing, it’s a no-brainer, right? We can implement as many encrypted emails and encrypted channels and you can do as much as you want, but at some point faxing is just, it’s universal and the ease of use is there as well.
How many times you get an encrypted email, you have to make a login and you have to go to a portal and then you have to remember which ones you have. And if everyone did that, oh my gosh. So security is a very real tangible asset to invest in, and this data is incredibly valuable to bad guys to intercept. They want this data, it’s immutable for the most part, your social security number, you’re not changing every day. So bad guys, they steal a credit card on average they’ll make about $2,000 and they steal a medical record on average is 10 to 20 times that amount. So they’re making a lot of money off of that, off fraud.
That’s a terrible thing. Kind of like HIV clinics, right? And STD clinics, terrible situations to be in for our patients and then for us to be responsible for those sort of breaches, that risk compounds as a manufacturer. And also in healthcare, both industries targeted by ransomware and a lot of people are saying, well, they won’t go for me, right? I’m a small fish. But the data shows 40% of ransomware victims had less than a hundred employees. So not only are you open to extortion lawsuits, punitive damages, cybersecurity insurance, punishing you with multiple deductibles, that’s a big thing now. So a lot of risk surface there. And I believe the most recent statistic I saw was 60% of companies are going under after significant data breach, ransomware event, cybersecurity event. So needless to say, clinical experience wise, I recommend highly anyone to be investing into IT security and us here, we certainly have done our fair share of making sure our patients are safe.
And honestly, the recommendation I’m saying now may be a moot point because everyone here may be scrambling to get compliant. The 117th Congress started with nine cybersecurity proposals. So certainly everybody is very interested in keeping our data safe breach after breach happens. Even from security companies, I don’t want to disparage any companies on here, so I’m not going to say any brands or names, but companies that are known for security. So ETHERFAX coming in as a solution that says, Hey, we’re not going to host any of your data. We’re going to transmit it on a highly secure network. And by the way, you’re going to have benefits of it arriving at your destination within seconds for anyone who’s on our network. It’s just a beautiful solution and it’s a no-brainer for us. So
Elizabeth Halkos:
That’s great. Thanks for the overview and also reminder, regardless of what industry you’re in, that this is a widespread problem. And you somewhat answered this question, but I’m going to rephrase it in a different way, which is what problem were you trying to solve, or more specifically, did something happen that prompted you to make this decision as you were looking at workflow efficiency and fact solutions? Or were you proactively just looking to address the needs of a growing organization that has grown through mergers and acquisitions and other factors?
Matt Geary:
So we have a great story with ETHERFAX, and I love saying this story because it’s a little bit of mud on my face learning lesson and a beautiful solution as well from ETHERFAX. So basically we had a server crash on us and our redundant server did not fail over all the way. It was a partial failover. We learned a lot that day.
As one does when things go wrong. So it was basically a worst case scenario for us. Our team had to prioritize between multiple important things. We had employees that were down that couldn’t access their data. We had executive team who their profiles were down, domain controller was down. It was kind of a chaos engineering event where you would want to make sure everything down the chain is running the way it should. So essentially what it boiled down to was doctors sign off on our product and that’s due to a medical need and the patients are waiting for us to process it, and meanwhile they’re at a higher risk of infection because the alternatives to our product, they keep your skin wet and you’re at a chance for UTI. And so our product is part of initiative, an industry ride initiative called a codi, which is reducing catheter associated UTIs.
And so we’re essentially evaluating at that moment when this happened, how do we get the faxing up as soon as possible? We had a traditional faxing pots line and that server was not able to communicate out. So I reached out to ETHERFAX to quickly just get our inbound faxes working, and essentially what my original was an emergency situation was just redirect the numbers, have ETHERFAX send it, and off we go. We’re in business. But I called and got Antonietta and she not only got an engineer on the call immediately, I believe, if my memory serves me correctly, this was a few years ago, but she interrupted his meeting and she’s like, hold on. And it was just, you don’t get that kind of a customer support or service anywhere. So everything I received immediately as I needed it, she took care of it. And the exact system that we put in place as a bandaid is actually right now running. And I think that’s pretty cool that it’s only grown from there. And it wasn’t something that we just patched together. It truly was an end-to-end solution and happened in an emergency situation and happened very quickly.
Elizabeth Halkos:
How did you get the ETHERFAX connection?
Matt Geary:
Yeah, so I believe the medical software space is pretty small. The ETHERFAX name is a big name. We also use Fax Finder, MultiTech, and I know you guys do some work with them. So essentially it was already something that we knew about, but certainly we didn’t have a notion of who immediately we could get in touch with. Honestly, I was going to get in touch with a couple and see who was the fastest and ETHERFAX came in and saved the day, the first call.
Watch the webinar for more!